They were assaulted by a force armed with slingshots and clay
balls. The attackers, possibly from a city named Uruk and perhaps
motivated by Hamoukar's access to copper, succeeded in taking the
city, destroying part of it through fire. [ 10
Ways Combat Has Changed Throughout History ]

"The attack must have been swift and intense. Buildings
collapsed, burning out of control, burying everything in them
under vast piles of rubble," Clemens Reichel, one of the team
leaders of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's
Hamoukar Expedition, said in a 2007 University of Chicago news
story.

Today, more than 5 millennia after the battle, the horrors of
urban warfare are being revisited on the modern-day people of
Syria. But rather than slingshots, they face automatic gunfire,
helicopter gunships and, as Western intelligence agencies have
now verified,
chemical weapons.

The conflict has killed more than 60,000 people and resulted in
more than a million refugees being forced to flee the country. It
has also damaged and otherwise put in peril numerous historical
sites, including Hamoukar.

The area where Hamoukar is located has been spared much of the
warfare that has hit the country, but the
ancient city has been impacted in other ways, said Reichel,
who said the expedition's Syrian co-director was able to visit
the Hamoukar site in 2012.

Without a local authority able to protect antiquities, the
ancient city has undergone a modern-day building boom. Also, the
team's co-director "noticed that there was a big bulldozer cut on
the site right next to our dig house," said Reichel, who is now a
curator at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum and a professor at the
University of Toronto. "As I remember, it was about 25 meters (82
feet) long and 3 meters (10 feet) deep, so that's a very sizable
cut," which, it turned out, was dug by a contractor building an
addition for a school building.

In addition to threatening
antiquities on the site, these new buildings will make it
difficult for archaeologists to resume work on Hamoukar and
protect the site in the future.

"If there's ever a way back to Hamoukar, we have to really fight
an uphill battle there to protect the site," Reichel said, adding
that the newly erected buildings would have to be taken down
wherever possible. "That's going to be a major challenge," he
noted.

In addition, the artifacts the team has already discovered are in
danger, as they are being held in a museum at Deir ez-Zor,
located about 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest from the
Hamoukar site. [ In
Photos: Archaeology Around the World ]

"Deir ez-Zor has seen a lot of violence and a lot of
destruction," he said, adding that he's not entirely sure what
the situation is at the museum. "I have to say, I'm not
particularly optimistic; I think it's quite possible that it [the
museum] will see damage as well, and it's a museum that will be
looted." Some ceramic, faunal and archaeobotanical samples, of no
commercial value, that were being kept in their dig house may
also be lost.

Yet another risk is the possibility of a new insurgent group
taking over the area. The Guardian reported last month that
Jabhat al-Nusra, which the U.K. news outlet says is associated
with al-Qaida, is moving into the province where Hamoukar is
located, taking control of oil fields from Kurdish groups.

Reichel emphasized that although Hamoukar is impacted by the war,
it hasn't suffered as harsh a fate as
historical sites in western Syria, where the bulk of the
fighting has taken place.

"I don't want to single out Hamoukar; what is happening in
western Syria is really the big tragedy," he said, noting places
that have taken greater damage, such as Palmyra, Aleppo and sites
in Damascus. "Those are, of course, really at major risk, and
this is where most of the warfare and related conflict seems to
be going on."

Trip to southern Iraq

Archaeology in Iraq is still recovering from the effects of the
2003 U.S. invasion but there are positive signs in the south of
the country said Reichel, who recently visited the area,
assessing the possibility of future archaeological projects.

"We encountered guards virtually everywhere, and that's very
encouraging of course," he said, emphasizing that he can only
speak of the archaeological sites he saw in the far south of Iraq
around Basra and Nasiriyah. "Things are definitely getting
better; the security situation is much improved," he said, noting
that there are still some major challenges that need to be
overcome.

In part of northern Iraq, the situation for archaeologists is
better. "There's a lot of fieldwork going on in the north, in
Kurdistan, which is a semiautonomous region, but in
southern Iraq, we'll have to see what the security situation
is going to be like," Reichel said.

"This is one of the challenges," he said. "The other one is that
the costs of working, or even traveling in Iraq, are still very
high, partly because we still have to pay for security."

Nonetheless, Reichel thinks that in time, archaeologists will
come back to the southern part of the country. "I think it's
going to be a slow process of recovery," he said.

Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum is set to open a major
Mesopotamian exhibition featuring over 170 artifacts, many from
London's British Museum, on June 22. The museum is also running a
concurrent exhibit that looks at the looting in Iraq that
occurred after the U.S. invasion in 2003.